Sunday, March 27, 2011

How to Rollback Package Updates/Installation on Fedora /RedHat/ CentOS

Fedora 14, like FC14, uses yum for package management. yum is built on top of rpm, and pirut, pup, and yumex are graphical interfaces built on top of yum. Together, these tools provide a simple-to-use, powerful package management system.

One of the least-known secrets about rpm is that it can rollback
(undo) package changes. It can take a fair bit of storage space to track
the information necessary for rollback, but since storage is cheap,
it's worthwhile enabling this feature on most systems.

Here's cut-to-the-chase directions on using this feature:

To configure yum to save rollback information, add the line tsflags=repackage to /etc/yum.conf.

To configure command-line rpm to do the same thing, add the line %_repackage_all_erasures 1 to /etc/rpm/macros.